European politics and Europe’s position in the world are confronted by severe challenges. In security terms, the fair-weather option of the last 25 years, with the US umbrella close in case of the unlikely rain shower, is no longer available. The Trump presidency may be disturbing and unpredictable, but it exposes some uncomfortable truths. For […]

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European politics and Europe’s position in the world are confronted by severe challenges. In security terms, the fair-weather option of the last 25 years, with the US umbrella close in case of the unlikely rain shower, is no longer available.

The Trump presidency may be disturbing and unpredictable, but it exposes some uncomfortable truths. For example, that the NATO allies, if they expect protection, have to pay for it.

Add migration pressure from Africa (the continent’s population increases two-fold by 2050). Plus the consequences of the new ‘Great Game’ across the Eurasian double-continent, the growing rivalry between the US and Russia and China.

Europeans better hurry and wake up to reality. At least there are new players moving centre stage. French president Emmanuel Macron was elected last May; so far he struggles to translate his ideals of reform and revival into everyday politics. In Austria, Sebastian Kurz has been chancellor for just three months. The tangible outcome of the recent Italian elections, where rightist and populist forces captured approximately 46% of the vote, has yet to take shape.

In Berlin, the next centrist ‘great coalition’ government, a lacklustre alliance of two ex-grand old parties, was just sworn in. It is a last resort, a bulwark of mainstream politics, and a desperate bid by the country’s establishment to retain the status quo.

The status quo is indeed under attack. Continental Europeans have nowhere come to terms with neither the Brexit nor Donald Trump in the White House. With the US president now following up on his protectionist campaign agenda, and the stubborn Brits still insisting on a future outside the EU, despair increases. The worldwide pivot to identity as a key political factor, after decades of massive globalisation, cuts right across the European establishment’s, politicians and business, pet project of progressive integration.

At present, the guarantor of European stability is the confrontation with Russia. Vladimir Putin, the time-tested bogeyman, effectively unifies Europe and the transatlantic alliance. Without the fear of the Kremlin’s ‘aggressive’ agenda, European politicians would be running about like a chicken with their heads cut off.

Hybrid War, and no security system

A preferred topic of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other politicians in the West, the framework of European peace or the European security order, was a chimera even before the Ukraine crisis in 2014. Even if the signatories of the 1990 Charter of Paris believed in such a framework, it quickly eroded, as early as with the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia. Soon followed the superpowers’ rivalry for influence in the post-Soviet space, NATO enlargement, the secession of Kosovo, the Russo-Georgian War, the Ukrainian Revolution and the Russian annexation of Crimea. In business, an arbitration judge might use the term frustration of contract.

Today, hybrid war is a reality. It is being fought in cyberspace, in the media and at the frontlines of very real civil wars, with weapons virtual and physical, with mercenaries and propagandists, NGOs, rumours and lies, hacking and hacking accusations, finally sanctions and counter-sanctions. It is a war of the 21st Century, a post-modern war. The parties: the US and the NATO allies on one side, Russia on the other. It is a war about the minds, the perspectives and the narratives, not about territories. Neither are there NATO plans to invade Russia nor Russian plans to attack NATO member states. Whoever claims the opposite is only feeding the many myths surrounding that confrontation.

Fuelling it is a growing rivalry between Russia and the US for influence on the Eurasian continent. Moscow made quite some headway with its 2015 intervention in Syria. Russia is now the only great power with good or very good relations with nearly all Middle Eastern states and has managed to replace Washington as the ‘go-to’ arbiter in case of conflict. Still further east, Russia and China are establishing a long-term entente to push back US influence on the Pacific Rim.

Europe: The scattered dreams

For some years after the end of the Cold War and under US hegemony, Europe was able to develop and cultivate a self-image as a greenhouse of the future: a united conglomerate of post-modern, post-national, post-religious and post-power societies leading the world into the hyper-individualistic and super-global 21st Century.

Combining chiliastic euphoria and lofty Western philosophy, such a concept could only take root in a unipolar world order. The USSR was gone, and China was absorbed by its economic growth. The general mood was indeed so confident, that otherwise sober European politicians embarked on a series of semi-utopian projects: a common currency, the dismantling of border controls, the stripping of grand, old nation-states of their sovereign rights, and the inclusion of countries that were culturally and historically largely incoherent with the rest-EU, as members.

Twenty years later, all those projects ran aground more or less. The ‘new’ European values – liberalism, secularism, tolerance, maximised individual and minority rights – are increasingly challenged by the proponents of traditional ones: collective identity, family, nation, law and order, and religion.

At the same time, geopolitics have re-gained a decisively competitive character. Smart talk like that of win-win situations is far less heard of. China has announced its return to power politics. Russia’s comeback, stronger in terms of power than of economy, is evident. Both vie with the US for influence in Eurasia and, at least in the case of China, in Africa and Latin America. Some of China’s geostrategic designs, usually bundled with economic and political objectives, are so staggeringly ambitious that their implementation transcends the life-span of one or two generations.

Phases of Western-Russian relations

To determine the best way for Europe to adapt to those changes in the geopolitical environment, it is worthwhile to assess the different phases of Western-Russian relations over the last 100 years. With the Bolshevik revolution, both sides became proponents of antagonistic ideologies, a state that essentially continued until the USSR disappeared in 1991. That confrontation was immediately accompanied by military strife, starting with the 1918 Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the ideological conflict internationalised. The Spanish Civil War was fought as a proxy war between international leftists and rightists, with the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in the driver seat.

The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 bore all the elements of an anti-Bolshevik crusade. There was more than a faint hope among Nazi leaders that the new Eastern Front would convince the British to consider peace while Germany battled the ‘common’ enemy in Moscow. The hope was strengthened by the rejection of Stalin’s 1939 advances towards London and Paris.

In fact, the Stalin-Hitler pact that effectively freed Germany from the prospect of a second front was hammered out only after the Western democracies had turned down an alliance with their communist arch-enemy.

After World War Two, it was the United States’ willingness to continue the anti-Bolshevik campaign that attracted quite a few former middle and lower rank Nazis to consider supporting the new transatlantic and democratic Western Germany. Even in the younger generations, the hatred and fear their grandfathers felt towards Communist Russia lives on in form of deep-set suspicions regarding Moscow’s ‘real’ political objectives.

A new phase began around 1990, when 70 years of confrontation between two mutually excluding ideologies, dividing East and West in Europe and beyond, draw to an end. A fairly relaxed phase of Western-Russian relations began, with both sides viewing each other on a converging course towards peaceful cohabitation in a European house from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

That phase lasted until the end of Vladimir Putin’s first presidential term. With the 2004 Orange Revolution in Kiev, it was clear that both sides were locked in a competition for spheres of influence in the post-Soviet space. It was to a large degree a rivalry by coincidence. Most European politicians did not see their objective in the traditional sense of power politics. Energised by the apparent victory of Western-style liberal democracy, they saw their ‘democratisation’ programs as genuine efforts to make the world a better place.

On the other hand, politicians in Moscow could not but interpret NATO and EU enlargement, and the EU’s Eastern Partnership program, as a revival of the Western containment policies which they had experienced since 1919, originally as ‘cordon sanitaire’, a chain of Central and Eastern European buffer states isolating Bolshevik Russia from the West.

Phase number three, sometimes labelled the New Cold War, is again marked by confrontation but lacks the mutual systemic exclusion of two antagonistic ideologies. In so far, it rather resembles the pre-revolutionary rivalries of European empires. With the difference that it is much less Eurocentric than the conflicts of a hundred years ago.

In fact, it is not Eurocentric at all. Two of the driving forces behind today’s Eurasian rivalries are non-European countries – the US and China. Russia’s European-ness is hardly representative for the bulk of the continent.

Europe is no longer a pivot of geopolitical activity. What is left are engagements by Great Britain in partnership with other Anglo-Saxon nations, and by France, upholding its traditional focus on Northern and Western Africa complemented by more recent activities in the Middle East and India. But neither the scope nor the political, economic or military weight behind any such unilateral engagements are comparable to those of the rivalling great powers. Materially, Europe was in a position to develop multilateral hard-power, and geo-strategic plans, but it could not back them up due to a lack of unity, ambition, and strategy.

Of the global stratagems, the masterplans and Great Games that were invented and implemented in Western European capitals for about 500 years, there is one geopolitical project left. That is, to contain military conflict – war, civil war, terrorism – in its near abroad, i.e., in the MENA region (Middle East and Northern Africa), the Balkans and Eastern Europe. The aim is to protect peace and prosperity in Western Europe.

As invasions by conventional armed forces have become less and less likely, defence strategies and tactics are re-directed against the new phenomenon of hybrid warfare, for example, cyber warfare, fighting Islamic terrorism, and against the threat of uncontrolled immigration from the Global South.

Most other experts, at this point, would insist on yet another European objective: to spread, propagate and support, in the hinterland and beyond, European values like democracy, the rule of law, and human rights. One can assume that the majority of European mainstream politicians share that view, with some going as far as demanding an unconditionally value-based foreign policy.

The Downside of value-based foreign policies

The claim for a morally-grounded foreign policy, under present geopolitical conditions, is questionable. As a rule, the pursuit of moral objectives in politics requires as many or more resources than the pursuit of objectives that are attainable through negotiation and compromise (realpolitik).

In the 19th Century and earlier, when European powers routinely intervened in the non-European world, that was less of a problem. Their stark military superiority enabled the Old World powers to effectively pacify and control any situation with small resources. As was shown by post-WWII military interventions in Asia and Africa, this is no longer the case.

Secondly, as both Europe and the US can no longer guarantee swift pacification and sustained control, interventions in foreign conflicts come with an increasing risk of exacerbation. A good example is the civil war in Syria.

If the primary interest were to bring about peace, Europe would support the side that stands the best chance to win. As that is the government of President Bashar al-Assad, European support for it would be the logical conclusion.

But having declared (in the wake of the US) the rebels to be morally superior, such a move is out of the question. The result is that the West, which continues to support the rebels, effectively prolongs the war.

As long as the available resources cannot guarantee victory, interventions based on moral grounds will only intensify war, leading to more deaths and refugees. Peace and morality do not correlate.

In other words, a value-based foreign policy lacking the power to enforce its objectives will lead to more conflict. Successful realpolitik, while minimising the length of conflict and the number of victims, will have to settle with a morally inferior solution.

The NATO trap

For Europe, there is another argument why it should refrain from the wholesale adoption of morally grounded policies. With the three great powers, the US, China and Russia, getting increasingly entangled in their Eurasian rivalries, Washington cannot but view Europe as an indispensable bridgehead and the transatlantic alliance as a comfortable tool to help advance its Eurasian agenda.

In 1949 NATO was designed in view of a clearly defined enemy: Soviet Russia. In those days, US and Western European interests were almost identical. 70 years later, Russia has shaken off communism, China has returned as a great power, Europe is in relative geopolitical decline and Islam has become a source of chaos and crisis.

The Eurasian frontline, which seven decades ago meandered through Europe from Norway to Eastern Anatolia, today is inspired by Keith Haring: short and unconnected strokes all over the double-continent, the true signature of multipolar (dis)order.

As the pivot of Eurasian geopolitics shifts away from Europe, the Eurasian interests of the US and those of Europe increasingly diverge. US interests are challenged by Russia and China, European interests are not. To keep this from being recognised, the 2014 crisis came as a godsend.

By labelling Russia’s Ukraine policy – in truth the implementation of a proprietary version of the US’s Monroe doctrine (‘hands off my post-soviet hinterland’) – as anti-Western, anti-European aggression, transatlantic media and politicians had (and have) no problem to sustaining mainstream belief in a Russian military threat.

The mid-century concept of NATO defending the West against a Russian attack assumed, realistically, that the communist threat could not be divided. The Bolshevik objective of world revolution was systemic and universal. The threat was equally distributed, and the NATO defence principle ‘all for one, one for all’ was honest and legitimate: equal threat and equal risk.

In the 21st Century, neither Russia nor China pose systemic threats. Their respective interests are not universal, but particular. They might collide with US interests in the Middle or the Far East, but not concern Europe. Thereby the ‘all for one, one for all’ doctrine translates into an asymmetric equation: unequal threat but equal risk.

NATO is an effective tool against a systemic threat, with only two outcomes: to be or not to be. In a multipolar world with its rivalling interests, but without systemic threats, NATO does not fit. In particular, it might prove detrimental for a Europe on geopolitical retreat. Value-based foreign policies only make things worse. They tempt to engage, to take sides where good advice would be to keep one’s distance and stay neutral. They also invite all sorts of misconceptions, emotional judgement, bias, and deceit.

Take an intra-national confrontation triggered by ethnic or religious strife, power-hungry warlords, an oppressive regime or a mix of it all. What next? Politics and media, first in the US, then in Europe, set out and gauge the conflict according to their moral standards, eventually picking one side as the good guys and another as the bad guys.

Nobody asks whether the good guys are really good, and the bad guys really bad. Nobody asks what hidden motives also determined the picking. But politicians, morally committed and alarmed by upset media, will hasten to support the good guys. They want to be reelected.

Next, the bad guys seek their own protector, likely among non-Western, non-value-based governments betting on some net gain from the intervention. Eventually, moral values and Machiavellian reckoning jointly fuel a conflict that was ignited by some irrelevant local material or power interest and is now transformed into a soaring wound that spawns death and refugees.

German nostalgia politics

Germany’s new coalition government will continue the same ‘nostalgia politics’ as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s previous governments. Nostalgia, because what Merkel seeks is a return to the good, old days of the 1990s and early 2000s, when (apparently) a set of rules was in place, when Eastern Europeans countries were longing to ‘be like us’, and when Russia was sufficiently weakened to integrate within the beneficial Western hegemony.

For a generation of German politicians (and media people, intellectuals), the heady days of the 1990s, with Germany united as a country, integrated in a united Europe and set in a rule-based, harmonious global universe, were close to the consummation of German history.

But those days were never there and won’t come back. Nor will the rule-based international order the way it was meant and understood by the more realistic Western cynics: Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi. Where Jupiter is the synonym for the Great Arbiter, the US and NATO.

At present, with Western Europe and Russia at loggerheads, nostalgia politics will lead to nothing. Still worse, they exacerbate the situation because insisting on the revival of a status quo ante means preventing creative, new approaches from being pursued. As long as nostalgia politicians determine the Western agenda, and Vladimir Putin the Russian agenda, relations will remain as they are now: continued but slowed trade and investment; some cultural and sporting exchange; political communication on lowest heat; hybrid warfare with all its facets.

The hope that all this will someday disappear together with the Putin presidency is naïve. Whoever succeeds him, be it a nationalist or a liberal, will have to play the same rivalries, feed the same ambitions, and continue to strengthen the country in a multipolar world. The major challenge is faced by the Western camp, namely by the Germans. Their task is to scrap the dreams of global or even only European orders and accept the fact that, finally, history has returned.

]]>https://doc-research.org/en/wake-up-call-europe/feed/0Dr. Yakunin: Greece must take its fate into her own handshttps://doc-research.org/en/dr-yakunin-greece-must-take-fate-hands/
https://doc-research.org/en/dr-yakunin-greece-must-take-fate-hands/#respondFri, 16 Mar 2018 15:49:56 +0000https://doc-research.org/?p=60881Yakunin’s prediction that Putin will be the winner in the 18 March election is a common one. But he does not hesitate to state that what Russia needs is not a decision maker, but a “strong new generation, educated and committed”. He characterises Donald Trump as “a fact” and recommends that Greece “take its fate […]]]>

Yakunin’s prediction that Putin will be the winner in the 18 March election is a common one. But he does not hesitate to state that what Russia needs is not a decision maker, but a “strong new generation, educated and committed”. He characterises Donald Trump as “a fact” and recommends that Greece “take its fate into its own hands” in its relations with its neighbours and argues that current challenges such as terrorism require a new security architecture with the US, Russia and China.

Vladimir Yakunin’s reputation has been known since he was president of the Russian Railways, when he visited Maximos Mansion to meet Antonis Samaras. He has also met Alexis Tsipras. Since then, a lot has changed. The Jacobin no longer has a place in the Kremlin’s corridors: He is founder and president of the Dialogue on Civilizations Research Institute and is head of the Civil Governance Department at Moscow’s Lomonosov University. Kathimerini met him at the Delphi Economic Forum. In addition, on 22 March, his book “The Treacherous Path: An Insider’s account of Modern Russia,” (will be published). It is a personal look at modern Russia – the report of a diplomat, a KGB official, a minister and one of Putin’s closest associates, who for ten years was at the helm of Russia’s largest company.

Crisis of civilizations

“For me, the coincidence was that I was there,” he said, asking about his transition to Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute that he founded in 2005. Yakunin notes that it is not a “mutation” but a “development” of his personality. He insists that the development of a society “cannot be measured solely on the basis of GDP” and believes that we live in a “crisis of cultures” rather than a Huntington-style conflict (of civilizations).

Has Yakunin embraced Sergei Lavrov’s view that the world has entered a transition period?

“The West is in (a state of) disorganisation, but not only that. It is the process of transformation to postmodernity. Someone is trying to convince us that if we want to be fashionable, we have to forget traditions. This is not done. Human beings differ not only because of (their capacity for) thought but also the ability (to have) compassion. It is good to create a civil structure to protect individual rights. But when young people do not care about anything other than themselves, something is wrong. This is an ideology. But ideology has no compromises with other ideologies. Perhaps today we see the creation of a new ideology and its name is neoliberal globalisation. ”

“We do not choose parents or neighbours,” Yakunin said, commenting that the geopolitical environment of Greece is at a critical juncture. “It historically reminds us that the Balkans have always been the ‘hotspot’ of Europe. “It was the battleground of nations. Now the situation has changed, but not dramatically, we are talking again about Americans, Russians, Germans.” And, he adds, “Although I do not admire Germany’s policy, I will remind you of a statement after Trump’s statements that the US will no longer spend enormous sums to protect Europeans when Merkel said that Europeans must take their fate into their own hands. The same is true of the situation in the region. The more Greece sees itself as subject and not as the object of developments, the more it will affect developments. She must inevitably find solutions with her neighbours and take the fate into her hands. This also applies to the issue of name (Macedonia). Engaging more outside forces – the Americans, the Russians, or the Europeans – is not the way to solve the issue.”

Yakunin believes that global challenges, such as terrorism, require a pool of forces. And he points out that “the anti-Soviet Churchill sat next to Stalin by plotting operations against the great enemy”.

‘Common Security’

“It’s time to forget about ideologies and to cope with the challenges. A new common security architecture must be introduced with the participation of Russia, the US, and China. The previous architects were Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill, De Gaulle. This world ceased to exist with the collapse of the Soviet Union. We have to introduce something else, to have mutual acceptance of the risks faced by the world. ” For Donald Trump, he comments that “it’s not just the Trump, it’s a fact we have to take seriously in mind”. And Yakunin refers to the structure of the modern world, as “when the bipolar system that separated into the USSR and America ceased to exist, it was a stir.” As for today, “If everyone is so nationalistic and selfish and they call America first or Europe first, there is no room for cooperation.” And Putin? “I do not hesitate to say he will win the election. But what’s more important is what will happen next. I read that Putin does everything, he thinks everything, that all ideas are his own, that only he makes decisions. That is not possible. In order to promote the ideas that Russia needs, we need a strong new generation, educated, committed. This is most important.”

Respect for Turkey

“Today, Russia, which everyone thought was a defeated regional power, shows that it is a geopolitical one. Iran, Turkey appears to be a regional power, but they are not limited to this role. When Turkey applied for EU membership, I thought it would go beyond its regional position to become, if not global, internationally accepted. The point is how you succeed. Turkey has done so through the development and investment in infrastructure and technology. It was a good move. I admit, if not with admiration, with respect. ”

James K. Galbraith reviews in his special report inequality under globalisation: A reprise published at DOC Research Isntitute historic approaches to inequality, from Rousseau, Marx, and Smith to the Kuznets’ Curve, and explains how work by researchers at the University of Texas improves on the use of older datasets to measure inequality. He presents an […]

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James K. Galbraith reviews in his special report inequality under globalisation: A reprisepublished at DOC Research Isntitute historic approaches to inequality, from Rousseau, Marx, and Smith to the Kuznets’ Curve, and explains how work by researchers at the University of Texas improves on the use of older datasets to measure inequality. He presents an economics sans frontières, an empirical economics for an age of globalisation, an economics which treats interdependence as a foundational fact whose properties are to be analysed, rather than as an add-on to a prefabricated national model , transcending the conventional distinction between advanced and developing countries, and blending the two into a portrait of the world economy as a unified whole.

Galbraith is the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs; and Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin.

The DOC RI Vienna office hosted its 44th round table on Monday, 12 March, with a presentation by the former chief rabbi of Vienna (1983 – 2016,) Dr. Paul Chaim Eisenberg. about his new book Auf das Leben! Witz und Weisheit eines Oberrabbiners (To Life! The Jokes and Wisdom of a Chief Rabbi). Auf das […]

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The DOC RI Vienna office hosted its 44th round table on Monday, 12 March, with a presentation by the former chief rabbi of Vienna (1983 – 2016,) Dr. Paul Chaim Eisenberg. about his new book Auf das Leben! Witz und Weisheit eines Oberrabbiners (To Life! The Jokes and Wisdom of a Chief Rabbi). Auf das Leben celebrates life, with humour, irony and serenity. Rabbinic wisdom and Talmudic logic are woven into countless stories, anecdotes and myths.

Dr. Eisenberg discussed the book, and his transition from being Vienna’s chief rabbi to responsibilities in other parts of Austria. Eisenberg made jokes about his own life, and spoke about Vienna’s Jewish community, as well as current political affairs. For Eisenberg, humour is very important, and a good joke is one that carries a message. It should not be evil.The rabbi reserved his harshest verdict for religious extremists.

Fundamentalists who played “policemen of God” are, in his view, “completely humourless and completely free from self-criticism”.

It is reasonable to begin a review of modern texts on inequality with Rousseau, who distinguished between ‘natural’ inequalities of strength and talent, necessarily small, and those due to title to property, in principle unlimited. Some modern writers situate the debut of property rights in the rise of agriculture, therefore landownership, grain storage, and the […]

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It is reasonable to begin a review of modern texts on inequality with Rousseau, who distinguished between ‘natural’ inequalities of strength and talent, necessarily small, and those due to title to property, in principle unlimited.

Some modern writers situate the debut of property rights in the rise of agriculture, therefore landownership, grain storage, and the accumulation of artefacts but that is not necessarily correct. As Veblen argued, the ownership of women, horses and livestock, as well as slaves, servants and soldiers, no doubt predates farming by many thousands of years.

Rousseau’s contemporary Adam Smith put a passage in the Wealth of Nations on the “Inequalities resulting from the policies of Europe,” in which he implicates a particular form of property rights, namely monopolies granted by states to corporations (meaning townships), which enabled them to buy cheap and sell dear. Smith also advanced the taxonomic scheme of wages, profits, rent, which in the hands of Ricardo and then Marx became the fundamental concepts of a theory of distribution, culminating in Marx’s theory of profit as extraction of surplus value, which in the late 19th and early 20th Century was countered by neoclassical marginal productivity theory and the Cobb-Douglas production function – a mathematical expression of the idea, from each according to his marginal productivity to each according to his… marginal productivity – assuming constant returns to scale, of course.

In all of this and continuing to the present day, the ‘functional’ distribution of income largely reduced to wage and profit shares remained the dominant framework of taxonomic schemes. Notwithstanding the clash of insights and ideologies captured with this framing, and allowing for its undoubted utility in an age of limited data and a corresponding need for ‘fundamental laws’ and simplifying principles, it is an impoverished approach to the modern world and one that embodies the pre-scientific era of a priori rather than evolutionary or behaviour-based-taxonomies and classifications.

The foundations for an alternative were laid by Vilfredo Pareto and Corrado Gini, along with Max Lorenz. Their schemes for measuring the inequality of pay as incomes reflected a different conceptualisation of income as an essentially unified construct irrespective of origins, consonant with tax law, but capable of meaningful variations, while the unit of observation – persons or households – was reduced to a no-less prescientific status as an a priori basic category, reflecting the preconception that the ‘bourgeois household’ forms the universal undifferentiated building block of society, very much in line with the favoured schematisation of neoclassical economics. Neoclassical economists have been stuck with this framework ever since. They, therefore, explain further movements of inequality as the product of shifting demand or supply of a characteristic of the workers, namely ‘skill’– yet another a priori categorisation in the service of restricting the range of analysis and even of thought. To be sure the success of this approach as a disciplinary mechanism has been exceptional, relegating all challenges to fringe positions whose tenets are quite hard for those raised in the neoclassical tradition even to grasp.

The Russian Revolution and establishment of the Soviet Union made concrete the possibility on a grand scale of a socialist republic freed from feudal, capitalist or fascist control, and the Soviet victory in World War Two demonstrated the industrial and military potential of such a state, with the feat soon underscored by the outcome of the Chinese Civil War four years later.

Socialist prestige was high and against it, apart from the terror-power of the atomic bomb, the West needed to exhibit concrete and dramatic economic accomplishments as well as political discipline. This necessity was underscored at home in the Western countries by the power of trade unions and the expectations of veterans. From these sources arose social democracy, democratic socialism and the welfare state, including in their international dimensions the Marshall Plan, the Bretton Woods institutions, eventually the Alliance for Progress, Food for Peace, PL 480 and raft of similar initiatives, all of which were guided by the ethos of Cold War liberalism. Three of whose major figures were Walt Rostow, Simon Kuznets and Albert Hirschman.

Rostow’s central contribution was a simple scheme for ‘stages’ of economic growth, frankly subtitled ‘A non-communist manifesto’, written to project the model experience of the US and UK onto the world at large, free of interdependence or conflict, each country rolling down the runway to take off and eventually the plateau of high mass consumption. That flight at altitude cannot be sustained without fuel somewhat limited the aeronautical analogy but it was, at least, a message of hope and emulation. Rostow’s theory lacked explicit distributional implications, although ‘high mass consumption’ implicitly entailed the end-state of a middle-class society.

Simon Kuznets, an economist of high practical distinctions, sketched out a distributional theory of the industrialisation process. In simple terms, the advent of urbanised industries in an economy previously dominated by peasant or yeoman agriculture must entail rising inequality until the share of peasants and farmers drops below a certain threshold, at which point the dynamics of workers’ organisation and urban democracy take over and inequality declines again. This is the substantial basis of Kuznets’ famous ‘inverted-U’ relationship between inequality and average income, and it certainly captured one major aspect of distribution under conditions of industrial change.

Hirschman, a highly independent and original mind, explored the social psychological complications of the Kuznets insight in his concept of the tunnel effect. In two lines of traffic stalled in a tunnel, the sight of one moving ahead lifts, rather than depresses, the spirits in the other line. However, Hirschman was careful to note that if the second line remains struck for too long, the effect will be reversed; hope will be replaced by frustration and eventually by rebellion.

In any event, the Cold War liberals and postwar American Keynesians knew that their place was to advance the optimistic vision of controllable and progressive democratic capitalism. And political authority in the West, however tied to leading financial and business interests, did realise at least from time to time that actual results were also necessary. By the late 1950s John Kenneth Galbraith could write that economists had lost interest in inequality. Only perhaps in Sweden did it endure; there the Meidner/Rehn model specified compressed wage structures as a path to productivity and competitiveness, and Swedish social democracy implemented that model in a manner that drove Sweden over six decades to the top of the world income tables. But the Swedish School was a secret to all but the Swedes.

In the post-war era the division of labour between neoclassical macroeconomics and pseudo-Keynesian macroeconomics was pioneered at MIT and disseminated worldwide from there. Macro held on to a narrow strip of economic territory: unemployment, inflation, interest rates and money supply, the business cycle, the rate of growth and their interrelations through the quantity theory, the Phillips Curve and Okun’s Law. Distribution played no role. The personal distribution of income fell squarely into the microeconomics of labour markets, governed by supply and demand for various levels of skill, while the functional distribution was hardly spoken of at all except by the occasional house Marxist. In consequence for the advanced countries there was no theory of changing inequality. The Kuznets evolution was supposedly complete. The Cobb-Douglas distribution theory with Hicks Neutral Technical change predicted stable functional shares: personal distribution was an ad hoc matter of firm-size effects, industry-specific labour rents and efficiency wages. In graduate school in the 1970s this author was told that subject was like watching grass grow.

Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, circumstances began to force a change, perhaps first in the United States but not long after throughout much of the industrial and the developing worlds. An early hearing on these issues in 1982 at the Joint Economic Committee pointed an accusing finger at right-wing policies, and this message was reiterated in 1988 by Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, in a book that laid the blame on de-industrialisation and the war on unions, which were conspicuous features of the Reagan era and of Margaret Thatcher’s time in the United Kingdom. The point seemed obvious enough, but there was a subtle difficulty. The severing of micro from macro made it conceptually difficult for many economists to tie the Reagan Recession of 1981-82 as such to a distributional outcome. Instead, the emphasis fell on specific anti-worker political actions – the firing of air traffic controllers, deregulation of trucking, a radical-right National Labor Relations Board – when in fact the two sides of the economic phenomenon, the macro and the micro-political, were inseparable in practice. Still, this was a minor muddle compared with what was to come.

It was only in the early 1990s that mainstream economics began a concerted search for a less- contentious explanation of rising inequality, rooted in the labour market analysis to which distribution issues had been consigned. Given the evolving preference of applied micro-economists for data based on surveys of household characteristics – however limited these may have been by survey-takers’ fixation on race, gender, age, education and a handful of similarly simple categories – the evidentiary basis for a labour market analysis of inequality was remarkably thin. It consisted in important instances of little more than widely separated surveys of earnings stratified by worker characteristics, and then largely confined to a small handful of wealthy countries.

Undaunted, Bound and Johnson set the template for neoclassical investigation thereafter. Rising inequality was a matter of changing relative demand for a peculiar characteristic called skill, unobservable in practice but usually approximated by the number of years spent in school. Demand being driven by marginal productivity, the underlying cause had to be a ‘bias’ in the character of technological change; firms were demanding a better class of employee. The remedy to the resultant inequality could only be an increased supply of skill – more years in school. And this remedy had the peculiar characteristic that if enough people pursued it, the advantage accruing to each would diminish until it disappeared. Education was economically worthwhile only if it could be effectively restricted – a truism that is nevertheless in its way subversive. At Harvard, the high priests Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz eventually produced a thick book from which the ugly class politics of the 1980s had miraculously disappeared. In American economics, then and since, a thick book endorsed by Larry Summers is generally sufficient to win an argument; in this profession, proof by intimidation works.

The discipline of economics is such that to have purchase with the profession, any argument counter to ‘skill-biased technological change’ had to adapt the same broad framework of labour market supply-and-demand. Such an alternative was presented by Adrian Wood in an argument related to North-South trade, which he argued would expand the effective supply of unskilled workers in the Global North, driving down their wages in rich countries but raising them among the poor (where Wood argued factory workers form an intermediate skill class) thus moving inequality in opposite directions in the two spheres (or hemispheres). Wood’s argument gained an audience briefly but was ultimately dismissed by the mainstream; among other things the encouragement it would have given to sceptics of free trade made it politically incorrect.

It was at this point in the mid-1990s that analysis based loosely on the Kuznets hypothesis revived. Thanks in part to efforts at the World Bank to begin to compile a comprehensive global data set of inequality measures, along with income measures prepared by the Penn World Tables and Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) estimates of the relative purchasing power of different national currencies. Fairly soon after the publication of the landmark Deininger and Squire data set there were multiple efforts to trace the growth (or decline) of inequality on the world scale, resolving roughly into three conceptual measures as described by Milanovic: inequality between countries pure and simple (Concept I), inequality between countries weighted by population a (Concept II), and inequality across individuals irrespective of nationality (Concept III).

The diversity of concepts brought with it new sources of uncertainty in the result and indeed inconsistent – on more precisely, divergent – conclusions depending on the concept deployed. Thus, while inequality between countries (Concept I) tended to rise, inequality between countries weighted by population (Concept II) fell. The difference was largely due to the rise in average Chinese incomes, PPP adjusted, notwithstanding that China (reportedly) manipulated its participation in PPP surveys to reduce the measured rise in average incomes there for political reasons. Meanwhile Concept III inequality could be calculated only by merging datasets from different countries at either PPP or exchange rate equivalents; these numbers too were driven largely by national-average movements rather than measures of inequality per se, and the extensive data requirements meant that only a few years (initially just three) could be brought to fruition.

At the other end of the measurement-method scale, the Luxembourg Income Studies set out to blend and homogenise household and personal Taiwaincome surveys so as to permit detailed and accurate welfare comparisons – but with the limitation that such surveys are sparse, restricted mainly to the wealthy countries and for the most part to recent years. What one gains in fine detail on household characteristics one loses on the capacity for extensive international and historical comparison. In these matters, there are different ways to process a finite body of data but, methodologically speaking, there is no free lunch.

In this cacophony of facts and semi facts, Kuznets’ straightforward and intuitive hypothesis did not fare well. Indeed, most researchers citing Kuznets were not much interested in his narrative of intersectoral shifts; rather they sought inverted–U curves anywhere they might find them and made that the test of Kuznets’ thesis, irrespective of whether there existed an underlying framework of early-to-late transition from agriculture to industry and from rural to urban life. In retrospect, this work largely (or wholly) lacks enduring value.

For many researchers in this period, moreover, the relation of inequality to income level was no longer of prime interest. Debates over development, education, industrial policy (the East Asian Miracle) and economic growth directed attention toward the link between initial levels of inequality and later growth rates. Two competing strands emerged. One held that low levels of inequality were good for growth – citing Korea, Taiwan, and China but largely ignoring East Germany and the USSR – while the other advanced the opposite strand of thought, that income and savings must first be concentrated before investment and growth will follow. A fair summary of these debates is that by choosing periods, countries, data sources and econometric techniques with sufficient care, any position can be sustained. But whatever the result, this literature bore only a nodding resemblance or relation to Kuznets.

One is hard-pressed not to draw an unpleasant conclusion, that a driving force behind much inequality research on both right and left has been a search for polemical advantage. The very existence of the topic favours the left; it is no accident that mainstream economics shunned it for decades. But in many left-leaning accounts inequality is always bad – notwithstanding that it is a prime mover of human effort and an inevitable consequence of functional specialisation between labour and capital as well as of differential rewards based on skill, education, seniority, danger, responsibility or anything else. Left analyses have a proclivity also to find that inequality is always rising, and to minimise or dismiss moments when it may be on the decline. On the Right, the characteristic task is apology: inequalities are natural, they are just, and at worst they are unavoidable and don’t do excessive damage. They are the product of market outcomes, they can be overcome only by dint of education and effort; if they are not overcome in any particular case the fault lies with the worker or other economic agent and not with the social order.

Against this counterpoint of alarm and apology, a few lines of reasoning stand out as having a pragmatic bent and drive toward policy relevance.

Of these, the most significant is the oldest: The Meidner/Rehn (LO, 1951) model of wage compression as a path toward productivity gain in an open economy. The LO insight was that the composition and technological level of industry in a small economy such as Sweden is endogenous. Floors on wages drive out weak players and place pressure on stronger ones to modernise. The result over time is a superior industrial mix and a higher standard of life both in absolute and relative terms. Moreover, an advanced industrial base can support a large and well-paid service sector; the downside is that high tax rates may force the expatriation of high net-income persons, but this is a minor price. The Meidner/Rehn approach is highly validated by the Sweden experience over 70 years, but of less relevance to large economies that cannot export the full spectrum of backward technologies and cheap services. Still, to understand that economic progress occurs along a spectrum of existing technological levels and vintages is a critical insight, largely neglected in the neoclassical treatment.

A second framing of the issue of inequality in policy term builds on the model of Harris and Todaro, who studied urbanisation, minimum wages and unemployment in East Africa in the 1960s. Their sharp insight was that an unequal wage structure (say, across an urban/rural divide) generates migration and competition for the better jobs. If these are few and the pay gap is large, then job-seekers must necessarily outnumber jobs and unemployment necessarily results.

The Harris-Todaro hypothesis can be extended to many different circumstances – migrations in Europe, North America and China come to mind –tak and provides a testable hypothesis in contrast to the skill bias model. The latter predicts that more flexible-meaning unequal-labour markets will have less unemployment, since employers will be able to match pay to skills and requirements; they will choose to hire more unskilled workers if the latter are cheaper. The H/T model predicts the opposite, namely that societies with compressed and regulated wage structures will (within-limits) tend to enjoy lower unemployment, and (if they target investments cleverly) higher rates of productivity growth and larger manufacturing sectors than those who maintain their allegiance to ‘free and flexible’ labour markets. This proves to be one of the rare points on which evidence is spectacularly clear, as reflection on the cases of Scandinavia, Austria and Ireland will attest. The preference of employers for flexibility has everything to do with power, with a reactionary attitude toward modernisation, and nothing at all to do with ‘economic reform’ or combating unemployment.

A third pro-equality argument was offered a few years back by this author and several student collaborators; it is that when countries fight wars, as happens from time to time, the more equal of two combatants almost invariably wins. This appears to hold going back to classical times. Republics fight their way to independence, become Empires by conquest, fall into decay and disunion, and recede. Communist countries, particularly, did not lose wars unless they fought with each other or took on an-even-more egalitarian theocracy, as the late-stage USSR managed in Afghanistan in the 1970s. And when theocracies collide, the advantage lies not with the richer but with the more compact and coherent, which is to say, usually, with the Islamic.

None of these arguments are even referenced in the 700-page tome of Thomas Piketty which set out to provide an empirical account of the evolution of inequality worldwide. Piketty’s book also sought to embed that record in a theoretical framework capable of bearing the weight of comprehensive explanation. For this, a ‘new’ theory is evidently required, and while Piketty is at pains not to disparage the mainstream labour market education/technology theory, he is not prepared to accept it either. His grand scheme requires a framework capable of operating over a long span of history and pre-history – thousands of years – and for this the concept of skill-biased technology is too specifically modern, too tightly linked to the digital age.

Piketty’s proposed solution is to base a theory of inequality on the relationship between r and g where r is the rate of profit and g is the rate of economic growth. Where the former exceeds the latter inequality must rise, since capital (and land) are owned by the upper classes. So, it remains for Piketty to establish that r>g is both normal historically and plausible as a matter of theory.

For theory, Piketty reverts to the neoclassical standard, the marginal productivity of capital – a choice that requires him to make a drive-by shooting attack on Cambridge Capital Theory, which since the 1960s established that smaller ‘quantities’ of capital do not produce higher rates of return. Having made his attack, Piketty can (mostly) argue that a profit/interest rate drive by the marginal productivity of capital typically exceeds overall growth rates without recourse to the culpable (but correct) proposition that interest rates are set by and for the benefit of the state. Instead, for reasons not entirely clear, technology must keep raising the real rate of return on capital.

For Piketty, episodes of levelling are restricted to short periods of capital destruction in wartime – never mind that this did not happen in Germany in World War One or in the US in either war, nor to any dramatic degree in World War Two in France or the UK. Piketty also implicitly assumes that fortunes pass unbroken from one generation to the next – whatever it takes to fuel the hypothesis that the inequalities of the 19th Century were natural and the mitigations of the 20th an aberration, now (however regrettably) receding.

Piketty’s celebrated empirical work rests partly on archival research on patrimony in the Paris archives – a narrow foundation – but more on a compilation of income tax records from 29 countries. There is no doubt value in this collection, but recognising that value and its limitations requires acknowledging that (a) not every country has income tax and those that do not may not resemble those that do; (b) among countries that do have income tax, tax laws defining taxable income vary, as does the effectiveness of enforcement and degree of evasion, and (c) even in countries with good reporting and enforcement, tax law changes can alter the reported distribution without effect on the underlying reality.

The 1986 US tax reform was designed to be of this type – that is, to alter the reported distribution without altering the tax burden. The reform required high-income individuals to report more of their income while taxing the whole at a lower rate. The resulting bulge in Piketty’s top income share for the US in 1987 et seq. provides a substantial part of his case that rising inequality in America outstrips that in Europe. But it is fictitious, and should have been stripped from his series, but never has been. Further, some of Piketty’s longer run data are simply imaginary; there are figures in his book that report values for 2100 and 2200 AD. And as Noah Wright has shown, even those parts which have an arguable basis in fact do not support his central claim that the rate of profit is again coming to exceed the rate of growth.

What remains missing, in the account so far, is a reliable fact-base of information on the evolution of inequality over time and across countries, using a single consistent concept of inequality measured across the full spectrum of nation-states and with sufficient density over time to establish trends and turning points reliably. To summarise the state-of-play as of 2017:

– The World Institute of Development Economics Research (WIDER) has produced a comprehensive bibliographic compilation of inequality surveys, but any conceptually consistent panel will necessarily be a relatively sparse subset.

Luxembourg Income Studies have produced a fully-consistent micro data collection but for only a relatively few, mostly high-income, countries and years.

The World Bank has reverted to a dataset of numbers provided by member states with no attempt to assure consistency of concept. Consumption inequality numbers for (say) India are intermingled with income-based numbers for Western countries.

Piketty and his collaborators rely on tax rather than survey data, with advantages in covering top incomes but weak comparability across countries, limited overall coverage and problems of continuity within countries as tax laws change.

Milanovic has built a unified world inequality measure but based on a melding of internal inequality measures and country comparisons based on PPP estimates – largely driven by the latter and subject to their weaknesses.

Arguably, these approaches exhaust what can profitably be done from a record of survey and tax data assembled from diverse, incomplete, independent and conceptually autonomous sources. Further progress requires extracting, if possible, reliable information from alternative records, compiled with greater persistence and regularity over the decades and across the globe. But to undertake this task requires a different method, indeed a different measure of inequality, altogether.

What is remarkable, as the work of The University of Texas Inequality Project over 20 years has shown, is that suitable inequality measures exist – and have existed for decades – and that suitable source data are ubiquitous and easy to handle. So, the task of producing a nearly comprehensive, consistent world panel data set of inequality proved to be far simpler and far easier than the prior survey-based or contemporaneous tax-based approaches, as well as incomparably less expensive and faster to implement. Using these methods, a small group of students in Austin was able to supplement – arguably, to outstrip – some of the world’s largest economic research organisations.

The insight behind the UTIP measures touches on several distinct issues, especially the nature of category structures – of taxonomies – and the fractal character of economic distributions, which bears on the relationship between an observable portion of a distribution and the whole thing.

Categories are groups of individuals; the characteristics of a category are the statistical summary of the characteristics of the individuals covered by the category. Changes in the income (say) of individuals within a group change the average income of the group. One can, therefore, use a change in group average income as a proxy measure of changes affecting the underlying individuals. As group structures become more detailed and refined, the correspondence between group and individual necessarily becomes closer, until the two ways of looking at the data converge with each individual and her own group.

This is true irrespective of the overlying character of the group – whether individuals are classed by location, industry, age, gender, body weight, religion, language or any combination of these or other characteristics so long as the groups are ‘MECE’ – mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive – that is to say, non-overlapping and covering the entirety of that part of the population being observed. At all points, dividing groups into subgroups increases ‘between-group’ inequality. And after a certain point, the movement of a distribution consistently measured across groups must reflect the movement of the same distribution measured across individuals. There is no need for a ‘random sample’ to establish what the ebb and flow of the distribution is.

Moreover, if the prime forces driving change in a distribution of incomes or earnings are differences across substantial geographic regions or between different industrial or economic sectors, then a fairly rough group structure will capture the important movements over time – so long as the structure is measured consistently. The existence of administrative datasets, collecting income and population by region and employment and payrolls by sector and industry in hierarchical structures that remain reasonably stable over time, therefore turns out to be of great practical importance to a project of filling in the historical record of inequality statistics.

A limitation of categorical data in practice is that the group and underlying individuals covered may be a systematic (and therefore biased) subset of the population of interest. Thus, in a survey of manufacturing establishments, workers in units below a certain size may be excluded, while those in agriculture, services and the informal economy are not covered at all. But the fractal character of distributions implies that so long as the broad social relations of a society endure – so long as bankers make more than factory workers who make more than peasants – an increase in the inequality within a given observational frame – say, the manufacturing sector – is far more likely than not to mirror a change in the distribution writ large. By the same token, astronomical telescopes can see only a small sliver of the sky, and one can tell the weather – usually though not always – through a window at a glance.

The specific methodological contribution of the UTIP effort was to marry the above insights about categorical data sources – which are cheap and abundant in the real world – to Henri Theil’s proposed general entropy measures of between-group inequality, specifically the between-groups component of Theil’s T statistic, a simple and flexible formula that requires just two morsels of information on any group structure, namely the total population (or employment) and total income (or payroll) of each group.

From this, an inequality measure can be computed which is unaffected by sampling error, nor by inflation or by differences/changes in the currency unit over time. Moreover, the measure can be added-up at will across sectors or regions, or divided between them. The statistic is thus well-suited to the construction of dense, consistent long inequality time series, on an annual or even monthly basis where sources permit. The production en masse of such series from diverse national and regional data sources was an early UTIP contribution.

But there was more. For reasons that remain mathematically obscure – at least to us – in datasets that measure employment and payrolls across consistently-categorised industries or economic sectors – examples include the Industrial Statistics of UNIDO and Eurostat’s REGIO – the between groups component of Theil’s T statistic is effectively normalised, so that measures compared between countries – and not merely through time within a country – tend to correspond closely to the available survey-based measures (especially from harmonised data sets such as LIS) and to evolve smoothly across international frontiers (rising from North to South in Europe, for instance) in ways that strongly suggest that international comparisons with these measures correspond to underlying economic realities.

The same cannot be said for at least some of the survey-based datasets, which in some cases show sharp inconsistencies in inequality between neighbouring countries (such as France and Germany, for example) with similar income levels and open borders. But if France were radically more unequal than Germany as some datasets appear to show, then the street sweepers in Hamburg would be francophone. It is easy enough to establish that this is generally not the case.

The discovery in principle and practice that between-groups Theil statistics could accurately depict both the evolution of inequalities over time and comparative levels of inequality between countries (or other geographic entities, such as sub-national regions in Europe, or US states) opened up the prospect of a search for international, inter-continental and global patterns in the evolution of inequality through time, hence the possibility of identifying forces driving a continental or even global macroeconomics of inequality, as well as decompositions of each inequality measure into the specific contributions of each region or sector, enabling a descriptive history of inequality going far beyond, in detail, accuracy and causal implications, the limited information reported on households or persons in surveys. It also becomes possible to seek the institutional and political correlates of changing inequality within countries, as the measures prove to be sensitive reflections of revolutions, coup d’états and regime change. Sometimes even the mundane consequences of ordinary elections can be detected.

Before moving on to those themes, it is useful to ask, do measures of inequality computed in this way from a limited and systematically–biased data set, such as UNIDO’s Industrial Statistics, correspond to measures taken by other researchers over time in the customary (and far more expensive) ways? To assess this question, UTIP conducted two research exercises. The first was a comparison by linear regression of the UTIP Theil measures to an early collection of Gini measures from diverse surveys – the Deininger/Squire dataset of the World Bank, first published in the mid-1990s, and chosen for this purpose because it has a manageable number of distinct conceptual categories (six) and also because it was the dominant international comparative data set on inequality at the time.

The comparison showed that after controlling for concept – whether an inequality measure was gross or net of tax, whether it was a measure of income or expenditure, whether the observational unit was the person or the household – a large share of the variance in the DS set could be accounted for by just two variables, the share of manufacturing employment in total population and pay inequality measured across industries within the manufacturing sector. Coefficients on both variables were stable and precisely estimated, which thus permitted the construction of extensive estimated measures of gross household income inequality in Gini format, and so the construction of an extensive, dense and consistent dataset of this particular concept, conveying almost 150 countries from 1963 forward, more than available from any other independently-measured source.

The second verification exercise was a matter of comparing the UTIP estimates to inequality measures in the published record, a painstaking exercise carried out over a period of years, largely by Béatrice Halbach and Alexandra Malinowska, and reported in a World Bank volume. There is no easy way to summarise this evidence; it has to be examined and evaluated visually. However, a fair summary is that for wealthy and transition economies, the Estimated Household Income Inequality (EHII) series track available survey evidence on the same concept uncannily well, and generally falls – as predicted – between measures of ‘market inequality’ and measures of ‘disposable’ (or net) income inequality – the former high and the latter low.

For developing countries, a similar story holds, except that in some cases – typically larger countries such as Mexico, Brazil, South Africa – the EHII estimates tend to fall below those found by surveys. The relatively small weight of manufacturing in these economies may be partly responsible, but there is also the fact that in some large, poor countries a significant share of households reports no income at all – about a third, in South African data. This calls into question whether the meanings of ‘income’ and ‘household’ are comparable between wealthy countries and those with a substantial share of deeply impoverished people.

With respect to the United States, as well, the EHII estimates diverge from – fall below – survey and tax estimates of inequality because the wealthiest US households have substantial income from capital which they report. This adds an almost unique dimension to measured income inequalities in the US, closely tracking capital asset prices. Whether this makes for a ‘real’ as opposed to only a measurement difference with other wealthy countries is unclear. In any event, even after noting the exceptions, it is clear enough that the simple UTIP EHII model is a success at producing sensible and reliable estimates of gross household income inequalities over time, and the EHII dataset is the largest available consisting solely of independently measured, consistent inequality concepts. The one larger dataset of this type, which incorporates the UTIP measurements as a source, relies on interpolations across time and countries to fill out the missing years and countries. As a result, statistical analysis using Frederick Bolt’s SWIID (Standardized World Income Inequality Dataset) risks exaggerating the true degrees of freedom and statistical precision of the results.

The successful creation of conceptually consistent, dense panel datasets on inter-industry pay inequality and its derivative data set on estimated household gross income inequality, each with about 150 countries and about 4000 independent counties – year observations beginning in 1963, opens the door to a new kind of global economics. Such an economics integrates distribution – the central preoccupation of microeconomics in mainstream classical and neo-classical theory – with the presence of macroeconomic forces and influences on an international and even planetary basis. It is an economics without a priori national or regional boundaries, an economics sans frontières, an empirical economics for an age of globalisation, an economics which treats interdependence as a foundational fact whose properties are to be analysed, rather than as an add-on to a prefabricated national model – as in Keynesian macroeconomics – or as a mere incantation in a world of insular, supply-and-demand driven labour markets, each with its boundaries fixed, in practice, by the happenstance and whim of national or regional statistical agencies. Our work is truly global, and also transcends the conventional distinction between advanced and developing countries, blending the two into a portrait of the world economy as a unified whole.

We turn finally to what the analysis shows. Research possibilities with such a dataset are essentially limitless, since inequality measures can be compared profitably not only to each other but also to every other measured socioeconomic variable under the sun: income, life, health, violence, happiness. There is work here to keep researchers busy for decades. The UTIP team has largely – not entirely – steered clear, in part because the limited span of other data sets means that any comparison entails many lost observations – for instance, the famed Barro-Lee dataset on education has only a few hundred country-year data points – but also because establishing the credibility of our measures and exploring the relationships within our own dataset have proved to be challenges enough for a small, part-time team.

Sometimes the most basic facts are, from the standpoint of previous theory, the most fundamental. In this case, a glance at a map tells that there is a gradient of inequality measures that runs roughly from North to South, from wealthier countries to poorer ones, and also (to a degree) from East to West, in the sense that socialist or formerly socialist economies (unless they collapsed) had egalitarian qualities which their capitalist adversaries did not. This gradient plainly reflects the strength of an industrial and urban middle class in the wealthy countries, and the plain fact that without such a class, a country is necessarily both poor and unequal, an amalgam of landlords (and resource barons) and serfs. Especially high inequality readings turn up – no surprise – in the oil kingdoms and in the mining fiefs of the Third World.

This simple observation tells us that Kuznets was right – up to a point. There is an organic relation between income and inequality. In general, inequality declines as income rises. Kuznets’ view of an initial period of egalitarian peasant agriculture applies only to a handful of cases – such as North America north of the Mason Dixon Line in the 19th Century – and in the wider world only if one excludes – as he did – landlords and rental income. In the modern world, the case of post-revolutionary China fits under the rising pattern of Kuznets’ inverted U; one would be hard pressed to identify another important case. Meanwhile close examination of a handful of the richest countries – the US, UK, Japan – exposes another salient fact. In these cases, inequality rises as the economy grows.

This is the evident consequence of a structural concentration on technology and finance – to which I tried to call attention back in 1989 – countries that export financial services and advanced capital equipment to the world experience rising inequality in investment booms, and falling inequality in a slump. The Augmented Kuznets Curve first presented in 2001 (Conceição and Galbraith, in Galbraith/Berner), captures these stylised facts. In short, Kuznets correctly captured the critical role played by intersect oral structural change in inequality; his historical experience precluded him having applied that correct insight to the particular and peculiar facts of globalisation.

A second observational fact that emerges from a glance at maps is that countries of the core of the world economy– call them the OECD – resemble each other, and resemble their close neighbours more closely than their distant ones. Thus, the Scandinavian countries form a low-inequality unit, so do Germany and its neighbours, while the Mediterranean countries are more unequal. These are signs of economic integration; large differences occur only across substantial boundaries. Further, large continental regions – the United States – are necessarily more unequal than small European states taken individually, but the picture changes if one takes Europe as a single integrated continental economy, adding the between-countries element of inequality to the within-country components. When this is done pay inequalities across Europe are larger than in the US. Whether the same is true for all income is murky, because so much capital income is reported by the American wealthy. Such income exists also in Europe, but its extent is masked by a greater proportion of privately-held business assets and the presence of entire countries that live off of sheltering high-net worth individuals and families from the tax man.

Examining national patterns over time, it is clear that measures of inequality, particularly those of pay inequality in manufacturing, but also many geographic and intersectoral measures drawn from national data sources, are sensitive mirrors of underlying political events. Thus, the coup in Chile in 1973; in Argentina in 1976, the emergency in India, the reforms after 1993 in China, and above all the collapse of the USSR and of socialism in Eastern Europe show as moments of rising inequality. In some cases, these are dramatic. Meanwhile the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war and the period of post neoliberal recovery (and higher commodity prices) in South America and Russia in the 2000s are among the limited instances of declining inequalities. The social implications of declining inequality are not always unambiguous. For example, data for the late GDR show declining inequality on a steady path until the country disappeared. As a general rule, though, low and stable inequality is associated with strong institutions and wealth; high and fluctuating inequality is the lot of poorer open economies adrift on a sea of unstable commodity prices and interest rates, as well as military conflict and political upheaval.

Patterns of geographic contiguity establish the existence of interdependence and of global hierarchies. They also validate the centre-periphery view of economic relations under global capitalism and put paid to the practice of national economic modelling except for the largest, most autonomous economies of the global centre – one simply cannot understand what is going on, except by reference to global trends. They also establish the transnational scale of distributive relations, calling into question the notion of ‘microfoundations’. Instead of building a consolidated picture from individual or household data, a practice that assumes the autonomy of those units, the world appears to be structured from the top down and the question becomes, by what major force or forces?

An answer can be sought in a search in the data for global patterns – trends and turning points through time. The existence of a common pattern of movement is evidence prima facie of a common underlying force, with broad global effect on national distributions of pay or income. It is also per contra proof that purely national or local analyses of ‘market forces’ – the stuff and substance of neoclassical microeconomic and labour market analysis – cannot be sufficient to explain the phenomenon under review.

A simple inspection of trends and changes in mean inequality gives a strong clue to the sweep of events. There are four trends and three distinct turning points. From 1963-1971, no trend appears, and changes in individual countries are for the most part small. After 1971, while inequality increases in some of the wealthy countries, in much of the world it is declining. After 1980, there is a radical change, and the world enters on a period of large inequality increases, sweeping across regions beginning in Latin America and Africa, hitting Eastern Europe and the (former) USSR after 1989, and moving on to Asia in the 1990s. In 2000 there is a further turning point, after which stabilisation and even modest declines in inequality are found in Russia, China, Latin America, parts of Africa and elsewhere.

The meaning of these patterns seems accessible without requiring elaborate theory or hypothesis testing; mere knowledge of key economic developments at global scale seems sufficient. In 1971 the stabilising exchange rate framework of the Bretton Woods institutions collapsed – or more precisely was torpedoed by the anchor country, the United States. There followed a nine-year boom in commodity prices, led by oil; and fuelled by the recycling of petrodollars into commercial bank loans to the Third World. Inequality fell in the (numerous, relatively poor) commodity-producing and debt-increasing countries, which grew rapidly: it rose in the fewer (relatively rich) industrialised consumers. Two simple parameters, debt flow and oil prices, dominated the global pattern, while national institutions and politics affected the timing of effect in particular cases, such as Chile or Argentina on one side as compared with (say) Algeria or Iraq on the other.

In 1981 the global crisis ended the commodities-debt-and-development boom. The crisis hit first in the most exposed indebted countries, provoking a collapse of investment, de-industrialisation, a collapse of public revenues and public services, and in certain cases – Chile 1982 – a banking crisis. Inequalities rose as the middle classes were destroyed. Ultimately better-protected countries – the East Bloc – also fell before the pressure, along with the internal political strains it had generated. Financial liberalisation and its discontents then spread to the most successful of the developing nations, the East Asian Tigers, who entered crisis in 1997. Only China, which had maintained capital controls throughout (and, especially, resisted the temptation to lift them in 1995) remained untouched by this final act. That China was therefore poised to reap the spoils in the following decade is therefore not perhaps a surprise.

In the 2000s, following the NASDAQ collapse of April 2000 and the 2001 9-11 attacks, global interest rates fell and with China’s growth, commodity prices recovered, giving space for left-wing governments to come to power in South America and in parts of Africa, enabling broad-based growth and poverty reductions. Meanwhile growth in China spread past its initial geographic concentration on Guangdong, Shanghai and Beijing, while in Russia a new government took partial control of the national resource base, stabilising living conditions and arresting the free-fall of life expectancy, fertility, emigration, and violence that had followed the dissolution of the USSR in the early 1990s. So, in Russia too inequality declined. In the US a saw tooth pattern emerged, of underlying stagnation capped by income gains to property speculators and mortgage fraud, the signature elements of the ages of Bush and Obama. In Europe, the consolidation of the Eurozone replayed the global boom of the 1970s on a regional scale, as capital flowing to the newly bankable countries of Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain set the stage for the subsequent collapse – PIGS, or, Principal Instigator, Goldman Sachs.

And the collapse came. Curiously the Great Financial Crisis was in the first instance a debacle of the rich countries, reducing measured inequalities along the augmented Kuznets Curve. One can see this clearly in national data for the United States, and in Europe-wide data showing the relative losses in London and Paris, the great financial centres. The effects on the wider world ran through other channels: declining commodity prices, the return of reactionary governments (throughout Latin America, also in India) and especially above all, the ironic flight to the US dollar, capital markets and Treasury bonds. A final discovery of the UTIP team underscores the point: the relationship of pay inequality to exchange rates, measured against the dollar.

From a theoretical point of view, the nexus of exchange rates and inequality is of interest partly because it is on reflection transparent and clear; the lines of causality are unmistakable. A manufacturer has only two possible markets – those inside the country and those outside. Typically – if not invariably – a country exports its best products, and the pay scales of the exporting sectors exceed those who sell only or largely at home. From this it follows instantly that a depreciation of the national currency raises inequality: the peso or real or rupee income of the exporter rises, while that of the non-exporter stays the same. Inequality must rise as a pure matter of accounting-and all the more so, if the increased local currency flows are concentrated within the exporting sector. No behavioural response or effect on trade flows is required, no J-curve or other exotic effect. Devaluations raise inequality and appreciations drive it down. Moreover, we already know that variations in pay inequality drive household income inequality, so the line of causality is unambiguous – from the exchange rate to the inequality measure.

How important is this effect? In an examination of data from over 30 countries, Rossi found that while the slope of the relationship varies, depending on proximity to the United States, the data speak with one voice. The relationship is almost always inverse and the proportion of variance accounted for by this one variable is on the order of 50%. The statistical chase comes to an end: that global financial capital drives the movement of inequality around the world seems firmly established. This, in a nutshell, is what we know about the relationship between globalisation and inequality.

James K. Galbraith

Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government and Business Relations, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, and Professor of Government, The University of Texas at Austin

References

Atkinson, A. B., Rainwater, L., and Smeeding, T. M. (1995). Income Distribution in OECD Countries: The Evidence from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development: Paris.

Galbraith, James. K. (2012). Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis. New York: Oxford University Press; Spanish edition, Desigualdad y Desequilibrio, RBA, 2016.

Galbraith, James. K., Kum, H. (2005). Estimating the Inequality of Household Incomes: A Statistical Approach to the Creation of a Dense and Consistent Global Data Set. Review of Income and Wealth, (1). pp. 115-143.

Galbraith, James. K., Conceição, P. and Bradford, P. (2001). The Theil Index in Sequences of Nested and Hierarchical Grouping Structures: Implications for the Measurement of Inequality Through Time, With Data Aggregated at Different Levels of Industrial Classification. Eastern Economic Journal, 27(4). pp. 491-514.

The right of James K. Galbraith to be identified as the author of this publication is hereby asserted.

The views and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the original author(s) and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views and opinions of the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute, its co-founders, or its staff members.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please write to the publisher:

Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute gGmbH;

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]]>https://doc-research.org/en/inequality-globalisation-reprise/feed/0Inequality under globalisation: A repriseWhat we know about the relationship between globalisation and inequalityCapitalism,commodities,data,Development,economics,employment,Featured,Galbraith,Gini coefficient,households,income,inequality,Kuznets curve,liberalisation,macroeconomics,manufacturing,microeconomics,prices,profit,research,Socialism,tax,inequalityDigitalisation of the media in Africa: Prospects for changehttps://doc-research.org/en/digitalisation-of-the-media-in-africa-prospects-for-change/
https://doc-research.org/en/digitalisation-of-the-media-in-africa-prospects-for-change/#respondMon, 12 Mar 2018 13:55:49 +0000https://doc-research.org/?p=60750

Global media has become increasingly digitalised in recent years. These processes have had a detrimental impact on the traditional business models of commercial journalism, as audiences have moved online and advertising markets have consequently collapsed. Online audiences generally expect free content; attempts to erect paywalls have not been as successful an alternative as many had […]

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Global media has become increasingly digitalised in recent years. These processes have had a detrimental impact on the traditional business models of commercial journalism, as audiences have moved online and advertising markets have consequently collapsed.

Online audiences generally expect free content; attempts to erect paywalls have not been as successful an alternative as many had hoped. The digitalisation of media has therefore created a crisis for traditional media and its management models.

The digitalisation of media also presents new opportunities to think about the relationship between technology and society. The potential of these technologies to reshape the way citizens – especially the youth – participate in political debates has been met with careful optimism. Especially in African societies, as with other developing contexts in the global south, these technologies have sometimes been welcomed for their potential to ‘leapfrog’ traditional media.

While traditional media like television and radio still have the largest footprint in African societies, digital media have started to provide users with ways of becoming more directly involved in politics and of contributing to social change. Of particular interest for scholars of media and society has been the way African users have adopted and appropriated digital media technologies in creative ways. Examining the way the digitalisation of the media in Africa has taken place can provide us with a useful lens through which to view recurring questions such as the tension between new media structures and user agency.

Structural limitations and user agency

One of the recurring research areas in the study of digital media in the global south is the relationship between political economic questions such as unequal access to new media technologies: the so-called digital divide. Another key focus is the ways in which digital media are appropriated, adopted, and adjusted to fit local circumstance: the question of user agency. Scholarly work on digital media in Africa and the global south has largely focused on the former.

Although the obstacles highlighted by digital divide scholarship are important to note, especially when they prompt us to reconsider overly celebratory narratives of the liberating power of digital media, the latter question of user agency is arguably more important when assessing the impact of digital media on societies in the south.

However, the two aspects are linked; a good understanding of structural limitations to the widespread adoption of digital media in developing societies can direct attention to the many creative ways in which such adoption does take place, and, moreover, how those technologies are adapted to suit local contingencies. In other words, an understanding of the political economy of digital media in African and other developing societies can prompt us to more carefully examine how users display agency when interacting with digital media.

A focus on the way that digital media are adopted and appropriated will confirm Mabewazara’s (2015, p.1) view that vibrant digital cultures and practices in Africa are emerging despite infrastructural, political, and economic obstacles. Digital media provide African users opportunities to connect with a globalised media landscape, but these connections take place by means of a domestication and localisation of those digital technologies.

Digital media have therefore afforded African audiences the opportunity to move beyond the largely passive audience experiences of legacy media to being the active users of digital media, often in combination with older forms of media (Willems and Mano, 2017). Attention to how technologies are put to use and impact people’s lived experience in Africa, therefore, requires a departure from the more technologically deterministic models of ‘impact’ so favoured by media-for-development discourses and donor agencies (Chib, 2015).

Optimistic predictions for what digital media might mean for social change and democratic politics in Africa have, in the past, frequently been based on these technologically determinist assumptions. It is often supposed that merely introducing new digital technologies into developing contexts in African societies will automatically bring about social change and deepen democratic participation. These assumptions are usually linked to older modernisation paradigms of ‘development’: the idea that the media can facilitate a universal, linear trajectory of progress, and that new digital media technologies can merely assist in skipping or ‘leapfrogging’ some of these steps. The ultimate outcome of this teleology would then be the attainment of transparency, good governance, and economic growth.

In contrast, approaches that focus on agency, creativity, and human capabilities in putting digital media to use can provide us with a much richer and more textured picture. This focus on the agency of digital media users can provide us with an insight into how digital media technologies can assist people in enriching their lives and developing their capabilities.

Digital media and political participation

In many countries in the global south, social inequalities run so deep that many marginalised citizens find it difficult to engage effectively with state institutions in a way that affects policy-making. In these contexts, digital media – especially when accessed via mobile phones – can provide new channels for citizens to engage with politics on various levels. This does not merely include the passive receipt of political information, but also active participation in social activism. Sometimes this activism takes the form of political behaviour that seems ‘irrational’ at first glance. However, expressions of outrage, or even the sharing of gossip or jokes, can contribute to a deepening of political culture at the level of everyday lived experience.

Mobile phones as platforms for digital entrepreneurship

The greater ease with which information is disseminated over digital platforms – especially when facilitated by mobile phones – has had significant economic benefits for African societies. Whether this is in the form of farmers connecting to large international markets via the internet, small entrepreneurs running businesses from day to day using mobile phones, or individuals benefitting from remittances sent by relatives in the diaspora, both formal and informal economies are created and sustained in ways that have not been possible before.

Not only have digital media and mobile phones created pathways for African entrepreneurs and consumers to access local and global networks with greater ease and speed, but the technological sector that supports digital media – from mobile phones to laptops and internet connections – has come to require a digital entrepreneurship that benefits from the creativity of African citizens.

What is especially interesting is the way in which African users have found ways to adapt and appropriate digital and mobile media, for example, developing codes to communicate via mobile phone without using airtime – so-called ‘flashing’ or ‘beeping’ (calling and hanging up before the receiver can answer so as to avoid incurring a call cost). While this creativity can be celebrated as an ingenious way for African users to adapt digital and mobile media to their own circumstances, it also points to the often exorbitant costs of airtime and data which are obstacles to the use of new media technologies in African countries. Airtime comes at such a high cost in South Africa, for example, that it is often offered as a prize in consumer competitions, or airtime vouchers are given as gifts or freebies.

WhatsApp has become immensely popular for mobile phone users in South Africa because it transmits data at a much cheaper rate than SMS text messages sent via mobile phone data networks. In 2016, there were reportedly around 10 million WhatsApp users in South Africa, leading the mobile networks Vodacom and MTN to call for stronger regulation of OTT services (Van Zyl, 2016). Mobile phones have indeed become an integral part of social life in most African countries, where besides economic capital, mobile phones also provide social capital. Southwood (2008, p. xvi) refers to mobile phones as being the “sports car” of its age in Africa, an aspirational status symbol within affordable reach.

This place of mobile phones within in African media users’ everyday social realities provides access to digitalised media and a global information society which requires us to think about the role of digital media in Africa beyond formal economic indicators. One of the areas in which the extent of digital media’s impact on African social and political life has become evident is the interaction between social media and traditional media.

The political dimensions of social media

In view of the diversity of applications of digital media in Africa, especially those facilitated through mobile phones, we have to consider the impact on the whole range of human experience – economic, political, and social. The way digital media – from email, blogs, and websites to digital music, messaging platforms, and social media – give expression to everyday culture is as important as the connections provided to more formal channels of communication, political deliberation, and activism. In all of these interactions, social media in African societies is increasingly important as a space where the personal and the political meet. Especially in contexts like Zimbabwe where mainstream media use is largely under state control, social media platforms like Facebook can provide alternative spaces for political information, discussion, satire, and activism (Mare, 2016).

While the digitalisation of media has created severe challenges for traditional media business models, it has also created many opportunities for African publics to engage more directly with mainstream media and to create their own media to challenge dominant mainstream media narratives.

The symbiotic relationship between digital media and traditional media can be seen in South Africa, where citizen bloggers have contributed to a more participatory journalism culture. One example of how user-generated content on digital platforms can impact mainstream news agendas – and eventually even made global news headlines – was the case of Mozambican immigrant Mido Macia, a victim of police brutality.

Macia was handcuffed to and dragged behind a South African Police Services vehicle and later died of his injuries. The incident was initially recorded on a mobile phone by a bystander and then sent to the tabloid newspaper (a print media outlet that has been very successful, see Wasserman, 2010), the Daily Sun, which posted it on their YouTube channel and website and reported it in print. The video went viral on social media and news sites around the world. This story is an example of how newspapers can cater for local audiences in their traditional, print form while using social media to connect local politics with broader global audiences and interests. The result is an amplification of a local story for global resonance.

South African politics increasingly sees its agenda shaped or influenced by social media. Some of the first allegations of ‘state capture’ – undue influence by the Gupta family on former President Jacob Zuma – were made by a former member of parliament via Facebook, rather than a formal press release (Tandwa, 2016). These allegations, followed by others, eventually led to the downfall of Zuma in February 2018.

Posts on Facebook and Twitter have also led to major controversies over racism and identity politics, following racist posts made by prominent people. One politician who has often landed in hot water over insensitive, ahistorical, and crude remarks on Twitter has been the premier of the Western Cape province and former leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance party, Helen Zille. Other opposition party members, like Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, have also used Twitter to great effect, building up strong followings. The new President, Cyril Ramaphosa, is active on Twitter, and his predecessor’s controversial tenure led to the creation of several parody accounts – an indication of how humour on social media fulfils an important political function. Zuma, like his counterpart Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, has been the subject of countless satirising memes, gifs, remixes, photo-shopped pictures, and YouTube videos.

African youth are more active users of digital media than previous generations, who grew up as more passive consumers of traditional media. Arguably the most important example of social media as the medium of choice for African youth is the South African student movement, which began in 2015 and changed the country’s higher education landscape over the subsequent two years.

Significantly, the movement itself has become known by a Twitter hashtag: #FeesmustFall. Student protests, which caused university campuses countrywide to shut down for weeks at a time on several occasions over the last three years, have used social media very effectively to mobilise their followers and disseminate information about their cause.

Often adopting an online vocabulary taken from the US activist movement, #BlackLivesMatter, and imitating their semiotics of protest, social media proved a vital part of students’ arsenal of resistance. Not only did mainstream media struggle to keep up with events as they unfolded on the campuses and streets of the country’s major cities, major news sites often resorted to merely copying posts from student activists’ Twitter feeds. Students have also extensively used other social media platforms such as Facebook Live and Periscope to broadcast live feeds of their protests and subsequent political deliberations like negotiations with university management.

South African students managed to exploit social media and the evolving digitalisation of the news media to their advantage, demonstrating its relevance in the globalised contemporary democratic public sphere.

The hashtag #FeesMustFall became such an independent entity that it was included as a respondent in a court interdict by the University of Cape Town (UCT) against protesting students. The hashtag followed an earlier hashtag, #RhodesMustFall, used by UCT students demanding the removal of a statue on campus of colonialist Cecil John Rhodes. The movement was about more than the statue’s removal, as protesters also demanded reform of university curricula and that university faculty represent the demographics of the country better. Subsequent protest movements drew on the same nomenclature. For example, the nationwide #ZumaMustFall protest marches during 2017, demanding the resignation of the former president because of corruption, used a similar slogan, as did protests later that year against the high cost of internet data, entitled #DataMustFall.

What these examples show is that as far as the participation of young people in politics and social activism is concerned, South Africa has seen the rise of ‘hashtag politics’. Social media has emerged as a major news source in South Africa, even if the analysis and agenda setting for political decision-making following the protests still tended to occur predominantly in legacy media like newspapers, radio, and television.

Similar engagement with politics via social media can be seen in Zimbabwe (Mare, 2016), although the more repressive media environment in that country has prompted young people to make more use of satire and ‘hidden transcripts’ online (for example, fictional characters on Facebook) in order to contribute to political commentary.

Another important development to note with regards to the digital media sphere and politics in South Africa has been the rise in prominence and popularity of several news analysis and comment websites. Among these are the Daily Vox, which articulates a young, critical, and activist voice, the Con, established by journalists who used to work at the independent weekly newspaper Mail and Guardian and the Daily Maverick, which has emerged as one of the major comment and analysis sites in the country. The Cape Town-based online publication GroundUp also provides critical, alternative perspectives on events including student politics, using journalists and correspondents with good connections to communities in Cape Town and the Western Cape province.

Downsides

While acknowledging the important role that digital media, particularly social media platforms, play in activist politics in South Africa, we should be careful to avoid the technologically determinist trap of suggesting that digital media caused the protests or determined their outcome. These were some of the mistakes made in the initial, overly optimistic responses to the Arab Spring.

Instead, we should focus our attention on the ways in which digital media are located within African societies and remain limited by various social and economic restraints, in order to observe which pre-existing social forces are being amplified by social media. Besides social and economic restraints, we can also note political restraints, such as the recurring shutdowns of the Internet by African governments in response to citizen protests. In recent years, these have included disrupted internet services before elections in Uganda, anti-government protests in Ethiopia, an internet blackout in Cameroon, and the shutting down of the Internet after protests against the president of Togo (Dahir, 2017).

Like in other contexts around the world, where the ‘dark side’ of the Internet includes Islamist radicalisation, hate messages pertaining to refugees, fake news, nationalist mobilisation and support for terrorism, as well as racist and misogynist messages (Pohjonen & Udupa, 2017, p.1173), there have also been downsides to the Internet in Africa. Several examples of ‘extreme speech’ in Africa can be noted (Pohjonen & Udupa, 2017).

Tensions related to Africa’s history of ethnic and racial polarisation and conflict are often amplified in online contexts. In South Africa, there have been several recent cases of such online vitriol, where the case of Penny Sparrow’s racist comments – comparing black people to monkeys; this was found to constitute crimen injuria by a South African court (Stolley 2016) – has become emblematic of the negative potential of the Internet and social media to foment racial hatred. Social media have also been used by internet trolls, supported by the British PR company Bell Pottinger, to prey on racial tensions in South Africa in order to deflect criticism from former President Jacob Zuma (Wasserman, 2017).

What has become abundantly clear, however, despite some of these analytical caveats, is that digital media is rapidly reshaping political and social life in Africa, and is doing so in ways that amplify and shift existing social, cultural, economic, and political patterns. It is not enough to study digital media in Africa in terms of a lack of a deficit. African users are adopting, adapting, and reshaping digital media technologies to suit their circumstances and gratify their informational needs in creative ways.

Herman Wasserman

Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Chib, A. (2015). Research on the Impact of the Information Society in the Global South: An Introduction to SIRCA. In Arul Chib, Julian May, and Roxana Barrantes (Eds.) Impact of Information Society Research in the Global South. Singapore: Springer Open.

The right of Herman Wasserman to be identified as the author of this publication is hereby asserted.

The views and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the original author(s) and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views and opinions of the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute, its co-founders, or its staff members.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please write to the publisher:

Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute gGmbH;

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]]>https://doc-research.org/en/digitalisation-of-the-media-in-africa-prospects-for-change/feed/0Digitalisation of the media in Africa: Prospects for changeThe digitalisation of media presents new opportunities to think about the relationship between technology and societyAfrica,BlackLivesMatter,democracy,digital media,entrepreneurship,Featured,FeesMustFall,globalisation,Internet,Politics,protest,South Africa,WhatsApp,Zimbabwe,digital mediaInternational cooperation on arctic development and the digital economyhttps://doc-research.org/en/international-cooperation-arctic-development-digital-economy/
https://doc-research.org/en/international-cooperation-arctic-development-digital-economy/#respondMon, 12 Mar 2018 11:45:26 +0000https://doc-research.org/?p=60744

Between 28 February 2 March, the 2nd Russian-Chinese Economic forum, Eastern Perspective of the Russian Economy was held in St. Petersburg. DOC Research Institute Program Manager Andrey Filippov attended the conference and took part in discussions on infrastructure development and the digital economy. International cooperation in industrial production, Internet commerce, education, banking and investment in […]

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Between 28 February 2 March, the 2nd Russian-Chinese Economic forum, Eastern Perspective of the Russian Economy was held in St. Petersburg. DOC Research Institute Program Manager Andrey Filippov attended the conference and took part in discussions on infrastructure development and the digital economy.

International cooperation in industrial production, Internet commerce, education, banking and investment in medicine, the textile industry and tourism were discussed. One of the key parts of the forum was dedicated to international cooperation on the Arctic, in the context of creating an infrastructure for the development of the northern hemisphere and new logistics routes in the region.

Experts noted the demand to develop new financial and logistic models for decision-making in supply chain management, logistics and warehousing, and also stressed the importance of taking into account the climatic conditions of high humidity and low temperatures.
The widespread usage of digital technologies has a significant impact on economic development and international trade. Despite their popularity, they are still new and, promise to have a significant impact on global economic development over the next decade.

The conference was organised by the Committee for External Relations of St. Petersburg in cooperation with National Research University Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, the State Development Bank of China, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), and PJSC Sberbank of Russia.
More than 100 leading experts and heads of companies from 12 countries, including Russia, China, USA, Italy, and India, took part in the event.

Despite all the rhetoric, any objective researcher should accept that since the collapse of the USSR, Russia’s leadership in the post-Soviet period, including Vladimir Putin, has taken important, positive steps towards overcoming the ideological barricades that, even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and end of the Cold War, remain between Russia and the […]

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Despite all the rhetoric, any objective researcher should accept that since the collapse of the USSR, Russia’s leadership in the post-Soviet period, including Vladimir Putin, has taken important, positive steps towards overcoming the ideological barricades that, even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and end of the Cold War, remain between Russia and the West.

It even adopted Western institutional, political, and anthropological values-based models that were taken, virtually un-modified, from the West. It is now becoming increasingly obvious that both sides’ naivety in splicing these straight into Russian society, without taking into account the particular local environment and Russian history, was bound to deliver disappointing, and at times simply counter-productive, results.

In purely competitive and pragmatic terms, the West had seemingly achieved not only a final ideological-political and economic victory over Russia, but also a complete civilizational triumph over the country – dragging it into a process of Western-style transformation.

SOCHI RUSSIA – June 18 2017: City sculpture at the station square in the Olympic Park Sochi – a big red phrase “Russia 2018”

Integrated into the globalized world, Russia became part of the global financial system, and influential expert lobbies agreed that international organizations such as the Warsaw Treaty Organization should be completely dissolved. Thus, Russia faced a new reality in which the ‘West’ started to draw former Eastern Bloc countries into its orbit, including former Soviet republics.

However, the problem is that the ‘West’ – or more precisely the Western political establishment – faltered, undermined by its own haste and historic legacy of anti-Russia sentiment, handicapped by their lack of real expertise on Russia and Russian society.

This ‘knowledge gap’ continues to this day. There has been a steady decline in the amount of academic research into Russia completed at US universities. Whereas in the 1970s, around 200 MA degrees were awarded annually in the US on Soviet themes, this number had fallen to just under 20 in the 2000s.

This could explain why many Western policies with respect to Russia have been misguided, and seemingly aimed at stripping the country of its political agency, its capacity for independent action. These policies have clearly stemmed from the unipolar world paradigm, which long dominated Western political thinking.

This ongoing disregard for Russia’s sovereignty and refusal to acknowledge that Russia is entitled to have its own national interests – particularly regarding security – formed the context for Vladimir Putin’s speech at the Munich Conference on Security in 2007. On the one hand, this led to the further deterioration of Russia’s relations with the West, but it also had a negative impact on Russia’s internal political environment.

Western political elites have tried relentlessly to enforce their own neo-liberal dogmas and sense of societal values on Russia, while failing to see that even back at home the support for them was not as strong as they believed or proclaimed. Far from it, in fact, as we can now see through the deep societal divisions that have been exposed in the West.

At the same time a deep feeling of dissatisfaction, inequality, brutality of police, rise of terrorism and insecurity, as well as social, environmental, technological and anthropological risks have further divided contemporary societies. It was these factors – not some “13 ingenious Russian hackers” – that led to Trump’s election, or Brexit, or the post-electoral crisis in Germany, or the recent result of the Italian election. These events should clearly show that the world cannot be dictated by one country, one people, or – crucially – one set of ideals. It is most important at this juncture to recognise, however unwillingly, that these ideologies must return to polity and geo-policy.

It’s time to rethink the world order, one that is truly inclusive that involves all of the world’s powers, from West to East.

Russia has always been both a deeply ethnically and religiously diverse society, and also a profoundly traditional one. Orthodox Christianity has played a crucial role in the country’s development – from state infrastructure to literature and culture. Although integration with Europe was a priority for its rulers in many key periods of its history – it was never the sole priority. Spanning the entire Eurasian continent, Russia’s interests and influences were never limited to Europe. Russia’s connections to Asian peoples and states are deeper and more organic than those of any other European country.

It’s time to rethink the world order, one that is truly inclusive that involves all of the world’s powers, from West to East.

Today as Russia’s relations with the US and Europe are strained, its ties to China, India and post-Soviet states are developing. There is every chance that its relations with Europe and the US could improve, provided the process is rooted in mutually-respectful, organic development, rather than the imposition on a subordinate of a particular concept of globalization and hierarchy.

Successful inter-cultural and inter-civilizational communication requires both mutual understanding and good will. Yet we are living in an age of ignorance and unwillingness to learn. Prejudices, misperceptions, and myths are reinforced in online echo-chambers of our own making. People now live in an era of near instantaneous communication in which half-truths, distortion, and outright lies, have become highly consumed products. So far, the numerous technological advances have accelerated our interactions, but they have not, on the whole, opened up avenues for deeper, more meaningful dialogue.

Successful inter-cultural and inter-civilizational communication requires both mutual understanding and good will.

Added to this, there are a number of external imperatives that should provide sufficient impetus for all parties to ensure relations move to a new level of mutual benefit: threats from extremist groups, terrorism, severe environmental changes, or economic crises – to name but a few.

Despite this, the discourse around Russia in international affairs today remains heavily tinged with talk of Russia as a problem for ‘the West’ to solve. Russia seems to remain, in the eyes of a significant part of the international community, something of an errant schoolchild. It is chided repeatedly, subjected to lengthy lectures about ‘the right way’, and all too often, punished – as now – through sanctions.

MOSCOW, RUSSIA – JUNE 17: Beautiful sunset view of the Red Square on June 17, 2017 in Moscow, Russia.

On the other hand, from the Western viewpoint one can identify visible features of Russian political institutions and practices which are considered to be at least obsolete in the West. They include the absence of clear distinctions, checks and balances between different powers, Russian attempts to present itself as a self-identified separate civilization with its own unique set of values, or strong inter-connection between State and Orthodox Church, to name but a few.

Politicians must realise that this dangerous brinkmanship leaves the rest of us facing a precarious situation in which there is an escalating risk that the worst-case scenario will play out – not in their rhetoric, but on our streets. Nothing is to be gained from playing ‘Russian roulette’ with war at this, potentially even nuclear, scale. Reason must prevail.

Perhaps because of the isolation of the Cold War, within Russia there is a greater understanding of the importance of those periods during which Russia was a weighty European and Asian power. There is also a significant reservoir of goodwill – even today – towards even those countries that display hostility to Russia.

Some in Russia argue that the country was almost set-up to fail in the years following the collapse of the USSR, in that it was presented with constantly moving goalposts, and fictional reassurances over key ‘red-line’ issues. Scant recognition was given to achievements in institutional development where they were successful, while failures or aberrations were writ large.

The decades of economic stability that Western Europe, the UK, Scandinavia, and the US experienced were very different from what people across the former USSR and Eastern Bloc countries went through in those years. These memories are very raw for people across the post-Soviet space. Even the younger generations – born after the fall of the USSR – were profoundly affected by what they saw and experienced during those difficult years.

Yet today, across Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, the picture is different. Living standards have risen since those dark years, as have birth rates and life expectancy. People’s sense of their own security and the extent to which they are in control of their own destiny has also risen. International standards are now commonly applied to infrastructure and building projects in the country’s many urban centres.

MOSCOW, RUSSIA – MAY 24, 2014: Cityscape of skyscrapers of Moscow City business complex and river. Moscow International Business Center Moscow City includes 20 futuristic buildings

Despite this, today, when Russia’s state governance institutions – although far from perfect – are in better shape than they were 20-25 years ago, Russia is treated as more of a failure, as more of a problem, than it was then.

There is similarly scarce recognition of the extent of Russia’s diversity – or of the fact that as home to numerous different faiths and ethnicities, inter-civilisational dialogue is not a politically correct fad, it is fundamental to the state’s ability to govern.

The blinkered approach outlined above cannot but hinder meaningful cooperation with Russia on international issues of major concern. Unless a pathway to dialogue is found, these states will remain weighed down by historical and ideological concerns, and therefore, regrettably, unable to fully cooperate in efforts to respond to current threats.

As with any process of communication, the fault for ongoing misunderstanding does not exclusively lie with one side. Russia could have been more successful at voicing its position, at explaining its conceptual framework. It could have adopted a clearer, more open approach.

In working to improve relations, both sides would benefit from the addition of light and shade in their understanding of each other. This would no doubt helped them move away from deleterious and hostile caricatures of each other’s positions, and would help rhetoric and policy be more closely aligned with reality.

In working to improve relations, both sides would benefit from the addition of light and shade in their understanding of each other.

Taking the US and Russia as a particular example. Those two countries do not only share this inherited hostility. They also share a number of powerful examples of times they were able to work together: WW2, the aftermath of the Spitak earthquake in Armenia in 1998, and cooperation in the fight against global terrorism after the horrific 9/11 attack.

For all the many differences, Russia and the US nonetheless have more affinities than perhaps they would care to admit. These are some of the issues that I explore in my book, The Treacherous Path, which is due out in English later this spring.

]]>https://doc-research.org/en/treacherous-path-understanding-contemporary-russia-yakunin/feed/0Sochi, Russia – June 18, 2017: City Sculpture At The Station SquSOCHI RUSSIA - June 18 2017: City sculpture at the station square in the Olympic Park Sochi - a big red phrase "Russia 2018"bigstock-191653624MOSCOW, RUSSIA - JUNE 17: Beautiful sunset view of the Red Square on June 17, 2017 in Moscow, Russia.MOSCOW, RUSSIA – MAY 24, 2014: Cityscape of skyscrapers of MoscoMOSCOW, RUSSIA - MAY 24, 2014: Cityscape of skyscrapers of Moscow City business complex and river. Moscow International Business Center Moscow City includes 20 futuristic buildingsThe rise of Corbyn’s Labour party and the eclipse of the Tory mediahttps://doc-research.org/en/rise-corbyns-labour-party-eclipse-tory-media/
https://doc-research.org/en/rise-corbyns-labour-party-eclipse-tory-media/#respondThu, 08 Mar 2018 15:49:40 +0000https://doc-research.org/?p=60726

On 15 February 2018, The Sun led with an exclusive gotcha story. On this Tory tabloid’s front page was the lurid headline: ‘CORBYN AND THE COMMIE SPY’. According to a former agent of the Czechoslovak intelligence services, the leader of the British Labour party had met with him four times in the late-1980s to discuss […]

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On 15 February 2018, The Sun led with an exclusive gotcha story. On this Tory tabloid’s front page was the lurid headline: ‘CORBYN AND THE COMMIE SPY’. According to a former agent of the Czechoslovak intelligence services, the leader of the British Labour party had met with him four times in the late-1980s to discuss both domestic and international politics.

As proved by the top-secret reports reproduced on The Sun’s pages, Jeremy Corbyn had expressed a ‘positive’ attitude towards the Stalinist countries of Eastern Europe and shown his support for ‘the Soviet peace initiative’. Given the code name COB, this Labour MP had collaborated with the Cold War enemy through either naivety or, even worse, ideological conviction. Responding to The Sun’s shocking revelations, Gavin Williamson – the British Defence Minister – denounced Corbyn as someone ‘who cannot be trusted’ with the nation’s security. With the other Tory papers joining in the witch hunt, Ben Bradley – the Vice Chairman of Conservative Party for Youth – tweeted that the Labour leader had ‘sold British secrets to communist spies’. Corbyn was a traitor to Queen and country. No self-respecting Briton could vote for Labour under his leadership. The Conservatives were the only credible party of government for these troubled times.

The smearing of Labour as Stalinist dupes was nothing new. Most notoriously, during the 1924 general election, the Daily Mail – the best-selling Tory paper of the period – published the ‘Zinoviev Letter’ which had been fabricated by the British secret police with the help of Tsarist exiles. According to this forgery, the Communist International had ordered its local supporters to campaign for Labour as the first stage of a Bolshevik takeover of the country. Because the ‘Zinoviev Letter’ helped to secure a Conservative victory in the 1924 election, the Tory media has repeatedly used this Red Scare scam ever since.

For the Right in Britain, fake news, vicious trolling and unsubstantiated allegations are not innovations of the digital age. Instead, these techniques were perfected in analogue times for attacking its opponents on the Left. Heavily subsidised by advertising, Tory newspapers secured a mass readership for the rabidly reactionary politics of their extremely rich owners with a seductive mix of human interest stories, celebrity gossip and sports coverage. As a public service broadcaster, the BBC was legally obliged to offer a more balanced coverage of the party contest, but its journalists all too often followed the lead of their openly partisan colleagues from the print media. Lacking alternative sources of information, the British electorate has repeatedly been persuaded by smears and lies to vote in large numbers against its own class interests. For decades, by successfully setting the political agenda, the Tory press was able to intimidate and bully those Labour politicians who threatened the established order. Timid moderation was their only option for winning British elections.

Back in 1983, Labour was humiliatingly defeated by the Tories and their media propagandists when the party did try fighting on a radical left-wing programme. According to one stalwart at the time, its manifesto was the ‘longest suicide note in history’. Learning from this debacle, Labour’s leadership over the next decade determinedly moved into the centre ground of British politics. Policies that aroused the hatred of the Tory media like nuclear disarmament and public ownership were ditched with disdain. The members of the hard left were either purged or marginalised within the party.

By the time that Tony Blair was elected prime minster in 1997, Labour was firmly committed to NATO and had embraced neoliberal economics. According to the party leadership, bitter historical experience had taught them that British voters were only interested in consensus policies and would reject anything which could be portrayed by the Tory newspapers as socialist extremism. For these advocates of the Third Way, class politics must be abandoned as an old-fashioned relic of the industrial age. In their place, New Labour now offered the benign technocratic management of the emerging information society.

One of Blair’s most successful moves before the 1997 general election was neutralising the British tabloid press. Much to the disgust of many party and trade union activists, the Labour leader paid court to Rupert Murdoch – the owner of The Sun – and persuaded him to ditch the Tories as a lost cause. Like the other media barons, he was assured that Blair’s government would be as business-friendly as its Conservative rival.

Throughout its 13 years in power, New Labour was careful to keep the mainstream media onside by rewarding good behaviour with exclusive stories and regulatory privileges. Above all, its reformist policies never disturbed the elite consensus. More welfare spending and peace in Ireland required support for neoliberal globalisation and the invasion of Iraq. The wisdom of Blair’s media strategy was confirmed by the 2010 and 2015 elections when the defection of the tabloid newspapers played a decisive role in securing two Conservative victories.

During the 2016 European referendum, the Tory press secured its greatest triumph by persuading a narrow majority of the electorate to vote for Brexit against the advice of not only Labour and the Trade Union Congress, but also the Bank of England and the Confederation of British Industry. With a loyal readership of millions, the tabloid newspapers’ toxic brew of anti-EU, anti-immigrant, anti-poor and anti-Left propaganda was hegemonic.

For Blair’s admirers, the Labour members who decided in 2015 that Corbyn should become the next leader of the party were defying the harsh realities of British politics. This veteran of hard left causes was too easy a target for the Tory trolls of the mainstream media. Corbyn was a terrorist sympathiser who had shared platforms with not only the IRA, but also Hezbollah. He was a socialist who wanted to nationalise everything, a republican who snubbed the monarchy and a pacifist who would leave the country defenceless. Worst of all, Corbyn didn’t look like a potential prime minister with his high street clothes and eccentric hobbies.

Convinced that his elevation was a temporary aberration, the old guard of the party tried everything to remove the Labour leader from office. Helped by their allies in the mainstream media, they relentlessly attacked Corbyn and his left-wing programme. Yet, despite their best efforts to rig the ballot, they still lost the 2016 rerun of the leadership contest. When the Tories decided to call an early general election in 2017, the Blairites believed that their time had finally come. As in 1983, the British electorate guided by the mainstream media would emphatically rebuff a Labour party that championed hard left policies. In the aftermath of defeat, the moderates would soon be back in control of Her Majesty’s Opposition. There was no alternative to centrist politics in Britain.

When the first exit poll was announced by the BBC and Sky News after voting finished on 8th June, the media pundits’ faces betrayed their total surprise and complete bewilderment at its findings. For the entire campaign, these Tory and Blairite journalists had been confidently predicting that the ruling Conservative party led by prime minster Teresa May would win the 2017 general election with a massive landslide. The only question was how large would be her majority of the MPs in the House of Commons. Yet, now the impossible was happening. During the 8 weeks of the campaign, Corbyn’s Labour had succeeded in turning a 21% deficit in the polls into almost level pegging with the Tories on election day. Far from being returned with a commanding majority, May’s Conservatives were going to lose overall control of the Commons. The old certainties of British politics were obsolete.

In the months after the 2017 election, psephologists explained that the Tories had lost the support of both young and middle-aged voters amongst British electorate. Unlike the over-60s with secure pensions, paid-off mortgages and money in the bank, many of their children’s or grandchildren’s generations were less fortunate with precarious jobs, unaffordable housing and growing debts. As its slogan ‘For The Many Not The Few’ promised, the 2017 Labour manifesto offered a socialist programme to tackle the multiple failures of neoliberal orthodoxy. Increased taxes on the wealthy would reverse the Tory cuts in health, education, welfare and local government.

Student fees would be immediately abolished. The railways, postal services and utilities would be brought back into public ownership. There would be no more imperialist adventures overseas. Collaboration not confrontation would be the leitmotif of relations with the EU. Contrary to the establishment wisdom, the results of the 2017 election proved that hard left policies were vote winners. The fringe was now the mainstream.

When asked, many older people were supportive of key pledges in Labour’s manifesto like rail renationalisation and increased health spending, but still refused to vote for the party itself. Reliant upon the mainstream media for their news coverage, they believed that Corbyn was ‘unelectable’ even if they personally agreed with many of his policies. In contrast, this antipathy towards Labour declined among younger voters along with their consumption of Tory newspapers and BBC programming. Thanks to digital media, they now had alternative sources of information.

During the 2017 election, the two most shared articles were not published by one of the traditional outlets, but instead by AnotherAngryVoice – a lone blogger in Yorkshire who denounced the multiple failings of the Conservative government with his winning mix of witty graphics and passionate arguments. Crucially, unlike in previous campaigns, this polemicist was part of a flourishing network of Left websites that challenged the British establishment: Novara Media, Evolve Politics, Skwawkbox, Vox Political and The Canary. Adding to their impact was an outburst of popular culture dedicated to promoting the Labour cause. Jeremy Bernard Corbyn: What Was Done – a hilarious sci-fi movie – was watched by over 1,000,000 people. Nasser Razzaq released a continual stream of topical photos with anti-Tory captions. CorbynRun – a 16-bit homage app game – obtained 2,000,000 impressions in the run-up to election day.

The Artist Taxi Driver and Jonathan Pie created video rants lambasting Tory idiocies. Stormzy, Akala and other rappers mobilised their admirers by launching Grime4Corbyn. Captain Ska released a new Teresa May mix of their underground hit Liar, Liar. From the football terraces and pubs to music festivals and election rallies, the spontaneous chanting of ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’ to the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army came to define this summer of political transformation. Above all, these cultural interventions provided the memes which were shared again and again amongst friends and acquaintances on Facebook and Twitter. While the Tories were spending lavishly on top-down targeted advertising, Labour’s message was disseminated by bottom-up viral activism. Not surprisingly, potential voters were much more impressed by the opinions of people who they knew and trusted than annoying spam from a party publicist. For the first time in a modern British election, the enthusiasm of the Many had checked the hegemony of the Few.

In his leader’s speech to the 2017 Labour conference, Corbyn mocked the Daily Mail for printing 16 pages of smears and lies on election day. Given the rise in support for the party during the campaign, he was looking forward to this Tory tabloid printing 32 pages of ludicrous propaganda next time to ensure a resounding victory for the Left! Although it could still manipulate some voters, the old enemy could no longer terrify Labour into conformity.

The mainstream media had lost its monopoly over the flow of political information. Their tried and tested techniques of fabrications and trolling were losing their effectiveness. Labour now took pride in its socialist politics and wouldn’t be intimidated into abandoning them. Five months later, when The Sun accused him of being a Stalinist agent, Corbyn’s confidence in the new disposition was confirmed. Very rapidly, the alternative media exposed the obvious flaws in the story. The Labour leader made a video rebuttal of this fabrication for sharing on Facebook and Twitter. Within days, even the BBC was criticising Tory politicians for spreading fake news about Corbyn. Best of all, Ben Bradley was forced to apologise for his libellous tweet and donate money to a food bank in his own parliamentary constituency. As the next set of opinion polls revealed, The Sun‘s spy scandal had increased both Labour’s voting share and approval for Corbyn as the next prime minister.

Unlike the ‘Zinoviev Letter’, this Red Scare had been a flop. Most wonderfully, the Left can now prevail on the media battlefield for the first time without compromising its principles. When the next election comes, Labour will be playing to win with a truly radical programme. Class politics are the digital future.

Richard Barbrook

Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Westminster, London, England and a founder member of Games For The Many

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]]>https://doc-research.org/en/rise-corbyns-labour-party-eclipse-tory-media/feed/0Formation of a new international research team on hegemonyhttps://doc-research.org/en/formation-new-international-research-team-hegemony/
https://doc-research.org/en/formation-new-international-research-team-hegemony/#respondThu, 08 Mar 2018 12:51:21 +0000https://doc-research.org/?p=60715

On 21 May 2018, a round table entitled (Re) Inventing Hegemonies : Theories and Approaches will be held at Warsaw University by The Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute (DOC), The Faculty of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Warsaw and The Centre for Governance and Public Management (CGPM) at the Carleton University. […]

The round table is part of a DOC-supported research project on Regional and global power distribution leaded by Professor Piotr Dutkiewicz.

Political scientists from the Belgium, Canada, China, France, Italy, Poland, Russia, United States, United Kingdom will discuss and analyse the complex processes which are shaping the future of the world system.

The goal of this research project – by an international team of scholars that will combine rigorous analysis and policy recommendations – is to analyze future of power sharing arrangements, competing interests in macro-regional and global level and role of key-state and non-state actors in the process of securing maximum control of capital, labor, resources, global agenda, cyberspace and social media.

“Even though any hegemon wants always to keep maximum level of “hegemony” in order to secure better life conditions and stability for its citizens and geo-strategic position, keeping it for a long time is almost impossible in current world order, and therefore any hegemonic power has to engage in a confrontation with multipolarity, represented by ‘the others’. Clearly, the pair of ‘we versus others’ will shape the next years of the world order and this is what will be the topic of the upcoming round table,” explained Dutkiewicz.

“The faculty welcomes this initiative and is proud to host the international event. We observe this with big excitement as different aspects of globalization are as well a significant research area of the Institute. Therefore we are very glad that a memorandum of understanding has been signed between all three coordinating Institutes with the aim of future cooperation,” said Dr. Łukasz Zamęcki, political Scientist and coordinator of the project from Warsaw University.

Piotr Dutkiewicz is a professor and director at the CGPM, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, a research Centre in the Faculty of Public Affairs at Carleton University, a national Centre of excellence on public sector and public management reform in transitional and developing countries.

The Faculty of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Warsaw is one of the largest teaching and research unit in Poland and Central and Eastern Europe with more than 3000 enrolled students.

Dialogue of Civilizations is a research institute whose mission is to promote mutual understanding, inclusive development and equitable dialogue. It seeks to develop policy proposals based on scientific research that address key challenges faced by the international community, from infrastructure underdevelopment and economic inequality to civilization and religious tensions and conflicts.